Day: May 28, 2007

For those who have been watching, Zooomr (photosharing site that’s done by one 19-year-old) has been down all week. I visited Kristopher Tate and CEO Thomas Hawk on Friday and I could tell that it was a long week that wasn’t close to being over yet.

But now Kristopher’s mood is getting better. You can watch him live and talk with a bunch of other fans. Will it come up today? Will Zooomr’s longest week end?

Why did it take so long? They had a machine die as they were starting the move over to the new system. Plus a bunch of data that didn’t move smoothly to their new database. When I visited him on Friday there was nothing he could do except wait for machines to work.

To me, though, it points out why you need SOME funding behind you. If you’re going to turn on tons of new features you need to have a parallel set of servers where you can play around with, test things out, and then switch things over to. Kristopher told me on Friday that they, indeed, are looking for funding. The new feature set that they showed my cameras might just be the ticket to getting that. Kristopher is indeed brilliant, but needs help building up a team to take Zooomr worldwide.

What is the new feature set’s strongest feature? It’s been localized to a bunch of different langauges (its fastest-growing set of users aren’t in America because of that). Kristopher taught himself Japanese and lived in Japan for a while, so that understanding of Asian languages and cultures has already proved beneficial to Zooomr.

But now he needs to gas up, hire a team so that there’s not another long, sleepless week, and so he can buy the servers this service deserves.

I wonder, though, whether there’ll be someone out there who’ll fund this because the space is already pretty darn competitive? I have a feeling that because of Photobucket’s sale for $250 million to MySpace that there’ll be someone willing to bet on Kristopher. What do you think?

UPDATE: Kristopher just said he’ll probably have his new version up later tonight. Me? I’m keeping my fingers crossed for him.